208 On Slavery and the Study of Surveillance Sara-Maria Sorentino Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC, and Lon- don: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp ix + 213. Ongoing mass mobilizations against both the radically invasive surveillance state and the extrajudicial murder of black people begs the question of their relation: is anti-black violence but a parochial version of a more generalizable problem of power? The interdisciplinary feld of surveillance studies typically responds in the affrmative. Finding commonalities across various sites of social control, surveillance studies has become especially preoccupied with new, inclusive track- ing enabled by technological innovation. We are all, so surveillance studies says, increasingly affected by the intensifed (and even internalized) scope and scale of modern monitoring. This line of theorization, however, fattens the longevity and specifcity of racial policing into one species among an array of techniques employed to manage populations. Such preoccupation with commonality and the contemporary cannot comprehend how “race” is exercised as an extended, antag- onistic mode of social control and containment. The data breaches and infltration disabling Black Lives Matter protests, for example, are not only characteristic of a pattern of especially virulent government surveillance of black activists, intellec- tuals, and artists since the mid-twentieth century, but are also endemic to a larger project, beginning with slavery, in reifying and regulating being. By reframing racial slavery as central to the “constitutive genealogy” of sur- veillance, Simone Browne’s recent book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, begins to unsettle nested assumptions that would reduce the policing of whose lives matter (and how) to the exceptional and everyday extraction of personal information. Her conceptual apparatus, “racializing surveillance,” aims to do more than tack the problem of race onto surveillance studies’ already estab- lished repertoire of concerns. Instead, Dark Matters accesses historical scenes of racial organization (slave ships, auction blocks, plantations, and their aftermath) and their processes of branding (black codes, slave patrols, and one-drop rules) as keys to comprehending the present. That blackness is often “invisible,” “unper- ceivable,” and “absented” in surveillance studies does not mean, however, that it is merely “undertheorized” (8): like a black hole, its absent presence exerts a distortive and disruptive effect on its historical and theoretical surround. As Telos 185 (Winter 2018): 208–11 doi:10.3817/1218185208 www.telospress.com